Welcome! Sky Diary’s home is now here on my official site, ChrisKridler.com (the main menu is above in case you’re looking for the Chris Kridler home page, author services, books and more). I started chasing storms in 1997 and soon after that developed a website, first on America Online and then on the web. After building Sky Diary for more than twenty years in HTML, it became a bit creaky. I’m capturing the best of SkyDiary.com and transferring it to this site for a more reader-friendly experience. See the latest chase reports here on the blog and in the new index of storm chasing reports from recent years (continually updated as I add more of the archives). Stay tuned for updates.
Alethea and Chris pose in front of a supercell at Colby, Kansas, in 2021. Photo by William T. Hark, HarkPhoto.com.
Cow is our loyal companion on the road.
Alethea Kontis and I went to Tornado Alley in May of 2024 and, in spite of hitting a lull in a very active season, not only photographed the Northern Lights but caught several spectacular storms. I’m catching up on posting images in the blog; time’s been limited as my attention has been diverted to writing books under my pen name. That said, you can see all the storm chasing posts from this and previous years in the blog (with the exception of some very old posts I’m still moving to this site as time allows). You can read about our adventures here and on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube (please subscribe!). Thanks for all the fantastic support of our gas fund in 2024!
We started May 23 with casual optimism about our chase prospects. The fun part was that Alethea Kontis and I were storm chasing with Jason Persoff and Dave Lewison (Bill Hark had ended up elsewhere the previous day, but he would get great close-up views of what was to come). And we were chasing dryline storms, which I enjoy. I can’t say our expectations …
May 19 produced the storm we’d been waiting for the whole trip, the best storm so far — though another even more extraordinary one would come later. And it was a great day even if we didn’t see — really see — the tornado. More on that in a minute. We figured storms would fire in the eastern Panhandle of Texas, which they …
The thing about “chasing scraps,” as we call it when there isn’t a really promising forecast for supercells, is that it can wear you out. That’s partly because of all the driving – if you’re ambitious, you go wherever there’s a chance of storms. So after a couple of days of photographing beautiful places like the South Dakota Badlands and Monument Rocks in …
Exclamation points. I know. In two blog headlines in a row. But this was one of those moments that totally deserved exclamation points — May 10 in Kansas and May 11 in South Dakota, where Alethea Kontis and I photographed the Northern Lights. I’m including the video in both posts because it’s fabulous and I don’t want you to miss it! (Exclamation point.) …
While the prospect of storms was marginal during the first week of our storm chasing trip, we found ourselves tempted by another type of storm: the powerful magnetic storm predicted for May 10, 2024. I’d never seen the Northern Lights, and it was a bucket list item for me and for Alethea. We were pretty far south in Texas after our chase from the …
As the video title says, sometimes storm chasing isn’t pretty. Stuff happens. You lose cellular data. You get out of position. You get more out of position when the road turns into a one-way construction zone where a guy with a portable stop sign holds you hostage for twenty minutes while you wait for a pilot car. Add in murky skies, sight-blocking hills and …
The Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma is one of my favorite stops when we have a break during storm chasing. To have a break on the second day of chasing didn’t bode all that well, but who cares? Prairie dogs always cheer me up. So I was really sad to hear that my favorite prairie dog colony had vanished. (See the …
